Computing devices with touch sensitive surfaces enable users to use a finger or other object to perform various functions and operations. For example, users may be able to press buttons, slide scrollbars, navigate though documents, and draw objects using the touch sensitive surfaces. In smaller computing devices, such as smart phones and tablets, a display surface of the device is often designed to be touch-sensitive.
While these touch-sensitive surfaces enable users to interact with the computing device, they may make it cumbersome for users to quickly perform certain actions on a set of data points included within a dataset. This is because users may have to individually select each of the data points in the dataset and then independently select the particular action they want to perform on the selected data points, or vice versa. Such a process is time consuming and makes it relatively difficult for these users to quickly manipulate multiple data points in larger datasets.
In some instances, developers have provided area highlighting tools that, for example, allow users to draw, using the touch-sensitive surface, an area on a map to focus the results of a search to places within the drawn area on a map. However, these tools are provided to focus searches on particular geographic areas drawn on the map. They are not used, for example, to identify actions associated with data points in the drawn area, present the user with an interface to select an identified action, and perform the selected action on one or data points in the demarcated area.
There is a need for users of computing devices with touch sensitive surfaces to be able to quickly manipulate and/or perform actions on particular data points in larger data sets.